Holy Crap, you leave a thread for a little while and when you come back..... it feels like I died and went to TTC heaven. All these angel wings... we should take that smiley with the wings around it and paste Clay's face on it instead! YOU people are hilarious, I "secret heart" you all.

and he's falling off his pedestal a little now...with the panty issue....there are those that believe he's going straight to hell for enjoying those flying thongs..

and where the heck were you guys when I was giving my "Clay is human, get him off the pedestal" rants a few million pages ago? Sheesh, I had enough tomatoes thrown at me to make soup for Kansas.

Sorry Wishin. I was at the lurking stage at that point. But I agree. I mean, really, who can't see the humor in flying panties and all that they imply (and it looks to me that he is amused and thrilled by the concept). This is a guy who 9 months ago who was probably begging for a date. It has to seem surreal to him. (And these are impressions based solely on if I was "walking in his shoes" so to speak.)

I haven't been on this board for quite some time because of all the ridiculously obsessive Claziness, but I felt intrigued when I saw this story. So feel free to hate.

1. abrahammy - I think that you were the first person to actually put down what you were feeling. My only problem with your post was #4 where you go into Simon's supposed "Clay bashing". I actually agreed with Simon on pretty much everything that he said to Clay. I think that Clay's fans took it a little overboard. I think that he does have a very Disney-esque theme park type of voice. Not that that is a bad thing, but it is his type of voice. I can very easily see him singing for a Dinsey movie. I think that he also oversang many times and it was too obvious. But that's my opinion. Many of the Clay fans jumped all over Simon for stating this because they saw it as bashing. i didn't see it that way, but saw it a s more of simply a comment.

Simon never actually said anything like that...
"Motown the musical"
the facial tics and weird mannerisms
"over-the-top"
"not what we're looking for"

I might agree with Simon about Clay on his criticisms (not all), but also love Clay anyway. But I'm a Clayzy, what can I say?

Simon's bashing

I tend to try to keep an even keel when discussing Clay's performances and the reasons why he should or should not have won the competition.

I'm not going to be so calm about Simon. I have absolutely nothing but unmitigated contempt for the man. And I repeat: some of his critiques of Clay were vicious and entirely, completely uncalled for.

Everlasting Love - A Broadway comment would have been understandable this week. He probably should have commented on why Clay had not caught the real spirit of Disco music. However, Simon's commentary on Clay that week was every bit as damning as the commentary he gave to Joshua - who was very sick, horribly hoarse and desperately out of tune. Absolutely inexcusable. And that week, he praised CARMEN for being so marketable. I was furious.

Billy Joel night - It was absolutely right for him to say that Clay needed to calm down the overly theatrical facial expressions. Saying "I prefer you with my eyes closed" is an overt personal attack on Clay's general appearance - and as we found out later, he really was not above calling Clay ugly to his face. Just unnecessarily nasty.

Diane Warren night - Clay gave a really good, relaxed performance with very little theatricality. It was my personal favorite from him the entire run of the show. Simon responded with a long-winded diatribe on how he didn't belong in the AI competition at all, with absolutely no discussion of that night's actual performance at all.

Grease - "Everything" about it was not horrible. The jacket was. The choreography is extremely polarizing. Vocally Clay outdid Franki Valli.

He was smug and dismissive about "Unchained Melody", which is the only bearable version of that song that has ever been sung on American Idol.

In the weeks before the show ended, Simon went on talk shows and told us why Clay should not win. Great reasons, these. His feet are too big. He's ugly. He doesn't like his hair. His ears are too big.

On the final night, he told Clay that TV had made him handsome, because when he came in Clay was the ugliest man he'd ever seen. He has repeated that comment several times in the media since the show ended. Most recently, he said he thought Clay was gay and lying about it. And he thought Clay sold more copies of the single because everybody really, really liked Bridge Over Troubled Water (and that song would have given Ruben a number one record.)

I'm sorry, folks, but people bought Clay's single because they wanted *Clay's* single, and that's all there is to it. Some of the enthusiasm is over the singing. A very tiny amount of it may be over the song. A huge amount of it really is about the guy - for all the reasons we have been discussing in this thread.